Those are not qualities that win friends or keep loved ones close, but they can be mighty useful if you're trying to change norms, subvert tradition or undo constraints. Breaking barriers, as Jobs, Rothko and Rich did, can be exhausting. Naysayers abound. The status quo weighs heavily. Distractions pull you this way and that.

What must it take to create a singular vision and believe in it so absolutely that you can change the world? Critics will carp. You will toil alone. You will fight with people. To overcome inertia takes tremendous energy and single-mindedness, and the fuel is often anger.

When Jobs, known for his fierce temper, thought Google had copied the iPhone, he went ballistic. "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this," he told Walter Isaacson, his biographer. "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."

Rothko (1903-1970) blazed his own trail, too, beginning with traditional representational work and evolving into his well-known rectangular fields of color and light. He struggled financially, felt isolated and battled depression and critics, but he kept painting. Pushed to describe his work, he said the surfaces of his paintings "are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say."

His inability to compromise led to a confrontation with a luxury restaurant in New York in the then-new Seagram Building on Park Avenue. After agreeing in 1958 to provide 40 paintings to the Four Seasons, Rothko reportedly told the publisher of Harper's magazine that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every (person) who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won't. People can stand anything these days."

After Rothko visited the restaurant, he found it pretentious and ill-suited to his work -- chattering patrons, clinking silverware -- and quit the project. He returned the commission money and the paintings were never hung there.

Rich evolved into one of the most influential writers of the feminist movement, but fame did not distract her. In 1997 she declined the National Medal of Arts, the government's highest award for artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, Rich wrote that amid the "increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice," the government has chosen to honor "a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

Art, Rich added, "means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage."

What she and others were fighting for, she said in a 1984 speech, could be summed up in seven words: "the creation of a society without domination."